Writers LIVE: Janet Dewart Bell, Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement

During the Civil Rights Movement, African American women did not stand on ceremony; they simply did the work that needed to be done. Yet despite their significant contributions at all levels of the movement, they remain mostly invisible to the larger public. In Lighting the Fires of Freedom, Janet Dewart Bell shines a light on women's all-too-often overlooked achievements in the movement. Through wide-ranging conversations with nine women, several now in their nineties, with decades of untold stories, we hear what ignited and fueled their activism.

Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Lighting the Fires of Freedom offers deeply personal and intimate accounts of extraordinary struggles for justice that resulted in profound social change.

Janet Dewart Bell is a social justice activist with a doctorate in leadership and change from Antioch University. She founded the Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society series at the New York University School of Law. An award-winning television and radio producer, she lives in New York City.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 9, 2018